Sam Sosnowski
Art Director/ Graphic Designer, SOSDESIGN
Written by Cameron Kapernick on 2008-10-19
What do you see happening in the next five years in the Graphic Design industry?
I think it’s going to be an interesting time, particularly with the continued rise of the WWW (World Wide Web) and the digitisation of the print industry causing some major shifts.
The web side of the design industry is continuing to mature and cater for more sophisticated sites (CMS, shopping carts, intranets, blogs, etc.) particularly as clients become more web savvy. On the print side of things, large corporations are now colour printing their own work to save costs. However, there will still be room for the large commercial printers for those people who require high quality production.
The smaller printers are being retired due to the rise of mass printing by Worldwide and KwikKopy saturating the market. A similar paradigm to the Bunning’s and Mitre 10 bringing about the demise of all the small corner hardware businesses. Their quality is reasonable, it is not top end but most clients, to be honest, wouldn’t know the difference between top end and mediocre.
What are the biggest challenges you and your organisation face as a member of the Brisbane media community?
A major area that the graphic design industry is starting to work in over the last 5 years has been the web. There are a lot of clients and industries who are thinking of putting their businesses online and using the WWW as a business tool. Brisbane industry in general have still not realised the web isn’t simply a sort of showcase and a billboard, but is something they can actually use as part of their business and use to generate business from. I suppose the challenge for the Brisbane Media community is to ‘educate’ the clients to move into this area comfortably.
What are the most important/valuable skills that graduates can bring to your industry?
Fresh thinking and fresh design. Most designers come out of the educational institutions with their own style and quite a few studios (depending on the art director) will take their ideas on board.
Graduates tend to go through a growing period working through various studios till they find their niche. It may take two or three years for graduates to harden into their chosen industry.
How would you rate the performance of Brisbane-based media organisations in comparison to other national and international media hubs?
There are some very talented people here, but probably not at the level of designers in Sydney or Melbourne. Quite a few gifted designers have started here in Brisbane and then migrated to Sydney, Melbourne or overseas seeking more challenging levels of interaction and higher salaries. The competition amongst designers in Sydney and Melbourne tends to be a lot fiercer.
How has new media such as the Internet and mobile communications revolutionised your workplace?
Definitely, it has created a whole new area for studio’s and freelancers to work in. Unfortunately, some clients don’t really understand the web, and tend to use IT people who don’t have any interactive or design skills to get websites designed, so a lot of the nerd sites tend to be pretty boring. On the other side of the fence some graphic designers are not really web savvy. As the web is an interesting mix of business, marketing and IT, it has created some interesting business networking and relationships.
I was very lucky when I first came to Brisbane, to work as an art director for three or four years for a company that had both interstate and international connections, so I’ve have built quite a few international sites. The company also had a strong multi- media base which included content and script writers, film editors and music composers so it gave me quite a good overview of the multimedia web industry at the same time.
The new media has also allowed the communication and workflow with clients to be both long distance and a lot more fluid and efficient.
With the advancement and sophistication of Graphic Design programs such as InDesign CS3, and the saturation of Photoshop now a stable program on PCs, Do you worry that the services of Graphic Design practitioners will become less and less demanded?
I don’t, I don’t simply because most of these ‘powerful’ programs, both InDesign and Photoshop, firstly have a long learning curve to use comfortably. Secondly, I describe them as good sewing machines. If you can’t design clothing, make patterns, cut material, it doesn’t matter what program you’ve got, you are still not going to be a fashion designer.
It’s not the machine that does the design work, these programs are simply tools. It’s the skill, training and talent of the graphic designer that has spent a number of years refining their talent that produces a superior design at the end of the day.
Many universities offer communication courses that include basic training of these sophisticated programs do you believe this is ultimately a good thing?
It’s a really good idea to have an overview of what these programs are capable of doing, even though you may not be designer yourself. At least you can get a reasonably good understanding of them so you can actually direct someone. I direct people like animators, whilst I don’t understand the programs intrinsically but having worked with them for a number of years, I understand what the programs are capable of doing, so I can then direct them and get the best out of them. And knowing the programs, even on a fairly basic level, makes interaction with printers and graphic designers a lot easier.